Rayla from The Dragon Prince Fanart Plush

I was very excited for the new animated fantasy epic The Dragon Prince when the first set of episodes launched back in September. I watched the whole thing in two nights and just loved it! The world and the characters are so great, and I’m dying to learn more.

My favorite character is Rayla, the young elf assassin who has had to question everything she has ever learned about her world. She’s smart and badass and a little bit silly. So when Choly Knight launched her chibi human doll sewing pattern, I immediately thought, I have GOT to make Rayla!

The pattern is tricky and has a lot of small pieces, but the instructions are so well-written and illustrated that I had no trouble. It just took time to cut everything out and make sure I understood the steps before sewing. If you’re interested in making a cute, anime-style character, I definitely recommend it. It’s so satisfying when everything finally comes together!

I did have to modify the pattern slightly for Rayla. First, I edited the embroidery file to add her face tattoos using the InkStitch plugin for Inkscape. I had been reading about this plugin for a little while, but had not tried making anything with it yet. This little project was a great first project to actually learn InkStitch, and I was surprised how relatively easy it was. Hopefully I’ll be able to create embroidery files for my own plush designs soon!

After that, I followed the directions for putting the body together as usual. For Rayla’s hair, the long wavy hair in the pattern was perfect, although I modified the bangs to be more accurate. Rayla has both thin strands of hair falling in front of her ears and center-part bangs. I was able to draft patterns for those based on some of the other provided hair pattern pieces.

The horns had to be drafted from scratch and hand-sewn to the head after the rest of the body was complete.

Then came the clothes… oh boy. The pattern comes with some very cute clothing options, but nothing like what Rayla wears: a slim-fitting sleeveless shirt, leggings, boots, and a cropped hooded jacket. I basically drafted all of these patterns from scratch, based on the finished doll and concept art of Rayla. I had to simplify her clothes a lot more than I wanted, to be honest. Fortunately, I was able to modify the provided shoe pattern to make boots, so that helped! All the clothes are made out of jersey knit so they could be stretched over the body and pulled on.

As you can see here, I did add a hood to the jacket, although it’s usually hidden under her hair!

It was a fun challenge overall, and now I have my own cuddly Rayla to hug when the next chapter of The Dragon Prince is released!!